‘Mr. Robot’ Season 3, Episode 3: Filling in Gaps and Taking on Trump

Season 3, Episode 3, ‘eps3.2_1egacy.so’

On Wednesday “Mr. Robot” finally filled in some of the gaps surrounding the 5/9 hack, including what happened to the popcorn gun and how Elliot ended up in Tyrell Wellick’s SUV at the end of Season 1. The episode also suggested that Irving, the Thermos enthusiast and aspiring pulp novelist, has been involved with this story for a while, and revealed why Agent Santiago has often seemed to be working against the investigators who are trying to find Wellick. (The short answer: Because he is.)

But the biggest gap of all has belonged to Wellick himself, the possibly insane Swede with a God complex and daddy issues. We now know his disappearing act took him to a country cabin to cool his heels, grow a beard, split wood and work on Stage 2 of E Corp’s demise. Along the way we saw him bulk up and get broken down by Wallace Shawn, here playing an fsociety mask brought to life, before making an ill-advised escape attempt that cost a small town cop his brains (and Wellick an intact thumb joint).

It was a lot of Wellick, in other words. While this was necessary to bring the story up to speed — as well as answer lingering questions like, “So did he wear the suit the whole time he was gone?” — it also asked viewers to invest in the quandaries of a character we haven’t been conditioned to care much about, on an emotional level.

Wellick has always been something of an enigma. He arrived as a Patrick Bateman-style corporate striver-as-sociopath — both took out their aggressions on homeless people, among others — but also oozed insecurity. Martin Wallström’s composed, confident Nordic features could turn brittle in a heartbeat, and Wellick’s frequent flights into rage suggested that, like Elliot, he had less control over himself and his situation than he’d like.

His toxic ambition seemed driven mostly by his even more toxic wife, by her demands and his need to meet them. But his devotion to Elliot (really Mr. Robot), one-sided though it might have been, suggests that what he mostly craves is someone with answers to tell him what to do. Never a vision guy, Wellick’s more comfortable taking someone else’s plan and maniacally dedicating himself to it — he’s a slick suit full of avarice waiting to be directed.

In this he was like a human embodiment of a corpocracy that instinctively claims the work and spoils of actual visionaries for itself — think the fsociety gear for sale a couple weeks ago, or E Corp trying to ride the 5/9 hack to global currency dominance. But Wellick is clearly emotionally invested, too, at times to a sloppy extent. (“Subtext, you know?” Mr. Robot said, shushing his professions of love in the arcade flashback.)

He’s almost as eager to worship Elliot as he is Joanna, his affection seemingly stemming from the fact that each gave him a sort of purpose. The X-factor is, Wellick is also not entirely right in the head — that’s where the “possibly insane” dimension comes in, though it’s not clear if his is of the DSM-recognized variety, like Elliot’s, or some vaguer flavor of narratively useful TV crazy.

Whatever his damage, the apparent suggestion, in the nervy interrogation scene, that it derives from some rage, shame or fear over his father fell a little flat. (I think I preferred the enigma.) It called back to the contempt for his father he previously expressed to Elliot and obviously is of a piece with the daddy issues that drive “Mr. Robot.” But because we haven’t spent much time with Wellick, emotional revelations about his back story tend to have a “so what?” quality.

That said, now that we’ve dispensed with essentially Wellick’s entire Season 2 arc, I’m excited for the revelations yet to come. How will he respond to the news that his wife is dead and his son is gone? And now that he’s familiar with his beloved Elliot’s bifurcated nature, how will he deal with again being a tool of someone who, like E Corp or even his late wife, he can’t really trust?

Speaking of tools, it looks like “Mr. Robot” is really going there, in regards to making President Trump part of this story and the puppet of a foreign government to boot. (Of course the usual “Mr. Robot” things-might-not-be-what-they-seem caveats apply.)

Whiterose is manipulating events from her uncharted isle, summoning (as Minister Zhang) her propaganda arm — the cable news blowhard Frank Cody — to give him his barking orders. These include backing a Trump candidacy, rehabilitating Wellick’s image and promoting the fake news that fsociety is actually based in Iran.

“It’s brown enough, shouldn’t be too hard,” Cody says.

Get it? Cody’s fans are easily duped racists. They will blame Iran for their troubles and back Trump, even though “the guy’s a buffoon.”

“He’s completely divorced from reality,” Cody adds. “How would you even control him?”

“If you pull the right strings, a puppet will dance any way you desire,” Whiterose tells him.

Part of the energy of “Mr. Robot” comes from the way it plays with real-life events, a tactic that becomes potentially more intriguing as the series threatens to get into parallel worlds or other more dramatically sci-fi modes of reality distortion. (Some amateur theorists even posited that Trump’s election proves we’re now living in an alternate universe.)

But unlike the more impressionistic montage from the premiere, Wednesday’s Trump-centric sequence was pretty clunky — the unvarnished contempt made it feel like a jarring, didactic digression from the otherwise nuanced story.

I’m sure it’s terrifically satisfying to clown a man you despise with your TV show. But sometimes the show suffers for it.

A Few Thoughts While We Make Jiffy Pop and Watch ‘Big Brother’

• Bobby Cannavale continues to be outstanding as Irving, pairing the tremendous styling with a slyly inflected performance — you get the sense he’d sell you a Pontiac or have you killed with the same affable efficiency. Irving manages to serve as both comic relief — “Swedish Fish!” — and the glue holding much of the story together, and his ground-level orchestration of events and their participants, like his duplicitous pep talk to Wellick, is a nice counterpoint to the big-picture puppeteering of Phillip Price and Whiterose. Here’s hoping he sticks around long enough to finish “Beach Towel.”

• I was happy to see last year’s breakout Joey Badass return, if only briefly.

• Turns out not only did Elliot take out the gun hidden in the popcorn machine, he tried to use it to kill Wellick, who took the misfire as further proof of his and Elliot’s shared destiny and God-like status. Unfortunately for Elliot, Irving later cleared out the resulting squib load, enabling Wellick to eventually use it on him in the Season 2 finale.